Fever Fairy Tale – EATEN ALIVE

I did not want to do another post like this so soon.  I like to think I´ll never have to do them at all.  Some directors are so important to me that I disconnect them from the reality of the mortal coil.  They seem immortal. They are only as far away as my movie library.  I can connect with them at any time.  Then real life punches me in the gut.  It's always a shock to truly lose someone.  Romero’s passing hit me hard.  Tobe Hooper’s passing has devastated me.  

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is the best horror movie ever made, hands down.  According to my hands, at least.  Nothing else matches the terror radiating from Marilyn Burns during that family dinner scene.  I have never seen anyone put fear on film like Tobe Hooper.  It's not the fear that I admire most about the directer, though.  It's the fearlessness.  Hooper was not afraid to mix things up, to discard tradition, and to follow his own path.  He pinballed from sideshow freaks to suburban ghosts to naked space vampires.  He never took the safe bet.  His own sequel to TCM was everything the original wasn't, goofy, surreal, gory, over the top, and extremely funny.  It wasn't what anyone was expecting, and it was beautiful.  Hooper helped me develop an appreciation for strange, off-kilter cinema.  His movies showed me that flawed and unexpected can be more entertaining than perfect and predictable.

Like my ode to Romero’s DAY OF THE DEAD, I prefer to celebrate Hooper's work rather than mourn his passing.  So I’m diving into one of his movies that brings me absolute joy.  Not TCM, because it’s a bit too heavy for me right now.  Not THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, because this post would be 5,000 words long at least.  Instead, I present a less regarded but highly potent bit of madness about a man and his crocodile, 1976’s EATEN ALIVE.

The Capsule:

Judd (Nevil Brand) is an odd duck.  He mumbles incessantly to himself about his WWII trauma.  He's got issues with women, and terrible taste in music.  He does a lousy job of maintaining his dilapidated bayou hotel, The Starlight.  He also has the nasty habit of murdering the occasional guest with gardening tools and feeding the body to his massive pet crocodile he keeps in a pen beside the hotel.  Wide eyed Clara (Roberta Collins) finds this out the hard way when she takes refuge at the Starlight after fleeing the glamorous life of a swamp prostitute.  Judd barely has time to clean up before Clara’s father (Mel Ferrer) and sister (Crystin Sinclaire) come looking for her.  While trying to throw them off the trail, Judd must also make room for the mentally disturbed Roy (William Finley), his put-upon wife Faye (Marilyn Burns), and their adorable little moppet Angie (Kyle Richards), after the croc accidentally gobbles up the family pooch.  The strain on Judd to keep it together gets worse when local hellion Buck (Robert Englund) starts causing trouble.  There is only so much a poor hotel manager can take before people start becoming croc bait.

EATEN ALIVE (aka DEATHTRAP, STARLIGHT SLAUGHTER, HORROR HOTEL, and about a million other titles) was Hooper’s follow-up to TCM.  In many ways, it is the complete opposite of its predecessor.  Gone are the wide-open location shots and realism.  EATEN ALIVE is shot entirely on a sound stage, including the exteriors.  Hooper doesn’t bother trying to fool you.  Everything is artificial and confined, the lighting is unnatural, the color is otherworldly.  Not even time flows sensibly.  The color of the "sky" changes from an electric blue twilight to a nuclear blasted red dawn, but the night never ends. The term “fever dream” is inadequate to describe this nightmare, it’s a full-strength fever fairy tale.  Sort of like Hansel and Gretel re-imagined after a 12 hour mescaline trip. 

Part of the unreality is the idea thant anyone, no matter how desperate, would stay at the Starlight.  Never mind spooky, the ramshackle building itself looks dangerous.  There might as well be signs in the window advertising "In Room Silverfish" and “Free Tetanus with Every Stay!”  While it lacks the overtly insane set decor of TCM’s skeleton sofa and bone mobiles, it comes close.  Instead of a chicken in a birdcage, it has the saddest monkey in the world, languidly reaching for the sides of its wire cage.  Eventually, it dies of ennui.  I hope that it and the croc are the extent of the “Zoo” Judd advertises on the side of the building.  If there are any other attractions--a three-legged goat with syphilis, for instance--I’m glad we didn’t get to see them.

Although it was originally envisioned as a JAWS knock off, Hooper made the killer croc only a minor element to the story.  That was a smart move, because it is one of the shoddiest mechanical (?) monsters ever designed. Most of the time it looks like an immobile crocodile shaped canoe with a flip up jaw.  The shots of it chasing Angie around under the hotel are even worse.  Paper mache was likely involved.  For one shot of the croc racing at Angie, they attach the camera to the back of some sort of push toy gizmo with rapidly flailing legs.  It looks like she is being charged by Kermit the Frog.  In any other film, this would be a crippling drawback.  Here, it just adds to the lunatic tone.

It hardly matters, because the real beast in this movie is Nevil Brand.  Hooper has a special gift for directing the unhinged.  Nevil Brand’s performance as Judd might even surpass Edwin Neil’s Hitchhiker from TCM or Bill Moseley’s Chop Top from TCM 2.  The scariest part of Brand’s performance is not when he is chasing his victims with a bloody scythe, it’s his slowly percolating build up.  Judd is a man with no ability to relate to human beings, but has been forced to do so due to his occupation.  Disturbing quirks creep out even when he is on his best behavior, like the way he sucks on the sign-in pencil tip before handing it to Clara.  Similar to fellow hospitality manager Norman Bates, he doesn’t want to kill anyone.  It is a compulsion that horrifies him.  Judd lacks Bates’ carefully constructed defense mechanisms, though.  His madness simply explodes in a giggling frenzy that leaves him shocked and agitated at the results.  Hooper excruciatingly teases the wind up with long takes of Judd nervously puttering around, switching on and off lamps, and listening to grating country western music that would drive anyone to violence.  It is a relief when he finally snaps.

Any average director would have had his hands full with such an all-consuming nutcase like Judd, but Hooper was anything but average.  This movie is filled with batshit incidental characters, none more so than Roy.  In his scant screen time, Roy gives Judd a serious run for his money.  At first, he seems like an everyday henpecked dad resentfully following his critical wife’s orders.  Once behind closed doors, though, he quickly unravels into a complete psychotic breakdown.  He searches the rug for his phantom eyeball because he thinks Faye put her cigarette out in it (she didn't).  He barks while his daughter is crying about her lost dog.  In one outstandingly bizarre sequence, he makes high pitched squeals while trying to psychically crush his wife’s brain.  The best thing is, there is no explanation whatsoever given as to why he is behaving like this.  Faye acts like it is nothing unusual, just Roy being Roy.   In any other horror movie, this guy would be the killer (and a memorable one).  Here he’s just a guy biding his time before being eaten.  

Hooper doesn’t stop there, he sprinkles weirdos throughout the picture.  A fresh faced Robert Englund is instantly loathsome from his very first line, "Name's Buck and I'm raring to fuck" (seems awfully similar to a certain character from KILL BILL VOL. 1, actually).  Then there’s the heartless brothel madam, Miss Hattie, played by Morticia Addams herself, Carolyn Jones, inexplicably wearing what looks like burn makeup.  Even the nameless guys at the bar are freaks, jumping around like Maori warriors at any provocation.  Everything is so consistently bizarre that when the ineffectual Sheriff (Stuart Whitman) and Clara’s sister Libby have a normal conversation together, it stands out like a sore thumb.

While EATEN ALIVE has a radically different style than CHAINSAW, there is one thread that runs through both.  Fear.  Nothing reaches the lofty heights of that Texas treat, but there are some doozies here.  A lot of credit goes to CHAINSAW vet Marilyn Burns as the long-suffering Faye.  I have never seen any other actor whip themselves into such an authentically extreme level of terror.  Like her previous outing, her character doesn’t take much physical punishment, but is mentally tormented almost to the breaking point.  

As with the best of grungy ‘70s horror flicks, there are no safety nets here.  The story is so off the rails that anything could happen.  Normally when a kid is in danger, they are either taken out right away for shock value or they make it to the end.  Here, there is a very real chance cute little Angie could become a chew toy at any moment.  Why not? The violence Judd inflicts isn’t stylized, it’s just as clumsy and imprecise as you would expect from an old coot with a wooden leg.   The blood, although not excessive, looks disturbingly authentic as well.  It feels like the kind of movie where if someone had an accident on set, the footage would probably show up on the screen somewhere.  Not like a snuff film or anything.  Just a little, you know, snuffish.  

This film was honored with a spot on the notorious UK Video Nasty list, along with another one from Hooper, FUNHOUSE.  I’m sure their reasoning was that anything from the man that created THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE had to be harmful to young minds.  What I don’t understand is why THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE itself was never on the list.  Seems like an obvious oversight. I guess you can't accuse the censor board of being Britain's finest minds.

I never had the chance to meet Tobe Hooper, to shake his hand and tell him how much his movies meant to me.  He was a quiet, private man who rarely went to conventions or big events.  It's funny to think of how much beautiful madness came from such a soft spoken, mild mannered Texas gentleman.  It's a shame that we'll never get to see what he would have cooked up next, but I will treasure what he left us, flaws and all.  

Goodbye, Tobe.  You left the world a stranger place.

C Chaka